2011-08-10

What is happening with the MySQL conference?

What is happening with the MySQL conference?

I'm at the moment perplexed, confused and disappointed in what's going on around the traditional MySQL user conference. Percona yesterday announced Percona MYSQL conference that they will be organizing their own event during the same time and in the same place where this great conference has taken place for years.

The reason for my state of mind is that although there have been rumors about discontinuance of the O'Reilly arranged conference there hasn't been any announcement about this.

In fact, I have been working with O'Reilly to try to setup next year's O'Reilly MySQL conference with the intention of having it 'exactly like before', even if Oracle would not participate. The intention was to have Percona, SkySQL and Monty Program Ab and some other sponsors helping O'Reilly to drive the conference.

This is something that Percona has been very well aware of when announcing this (I personally talked with Percona about this a few weeks ago).

One of the main reasons we at MySQL Ab originally liked to work with O'Reilly is not only that O'Reilly knows how to do a good conference. We also saw the importance to have the conference being organized by a neutral entity to make it easier for competing vendors to be part of the conference. A conference called the "Percona MySQL conference" is not going to be seen as vendor neutral, which will cause problems in getting different vendors to attend. Giuseppe Maxia and Sheeri Cabral seem to think in a similar ways.

Personally I will wait and see what will happen with the O'Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo 2012, or equivalent neutral conference for the MySQL community. The best option, if O'Reilly is not doing it, would of course be a community conference where Oracle/MySQL participates actively, both as a sponsor and as content provider.

Thanks, Monty. I too respect Percona (they're a Schooner partner), but would prefer an O'Reilly conference. If there's no O'Reilly conference, Schooner is also interested in helping sponsor an alternative.

Why would O'Reilly drop the most important event in the MySQL world? I really like O'Reilly conferences like Strata, Velocity and of course MySQL. Percona people are great, we all know that, but also in my opinion a neutral sponsor is more proper. (sleep well Oracle)